Armored Brigade throws Russian waves of T-72s and T-80s at me? No problem. Goddamn Russian arty? Massacres Abrams like nothing else. I’m constantly having to move them because if they sit still for more than a couple minutes there’s a barrage of rockets landing on their heads.
I wish Matrix wouldn’t use XTRG for all their Twitch streams - I’m sure he’s a great guy and people like him but I cannot stand listening to his commentary.
Bruce suggests using porcupines.
So apparently the complete edition of Tank Warfare: Tunisia 1943 is currently on sale on Steam for something crazy (under a tenner at 92% off, for me) through to the 19th of November. Having never touched a Graviteam game in the past, if someone wants to sell me on the game that would be grand. Interested but not entirely sure what I’m getting myself into, haha.
I may have slightly underestimated the amount of work this mapmaking project represents. I’ve made a slice of Fort Benning!
Points of interest: barracks at the top, tank driver training courses (I think) in the middle, TV station building with a commanding view of the surrounding area at the bottom (just above the world Obstacles in the bottom bar).
And… that’s maybe one quarter of one 15km square, which is itself about 1/8 of the overall map.
I have that one and Operation Star. I’ve never been able to get into them, but I’ve always felt like maybe I was missing out and should give them another shot. I think they will require quite a bit of time to really click, because they’ve got an awful lot going on under the hood, but at the same time seem to require a light touch on the orders front. They certainly do not go out of their way to make things obvious, I’ll tell you that much. There are plenty of videos out there, but I hate learning that way. There is a “learner’s manual” that a forum put together that wargamer linked, and I’ve uploaded it to Zippyshare if you would like to take a look, because the forum requires registration to download, and your registration has to be manually approved and it’s not really 2005 anymore.
I think Mius Front is a better place to start than Tunisia, for simply geographical reasons if nothing else - Tunisia has lots of long, flat open spaces and it turns out German 88s versus Grants and Stuarts is not a fair fight over that terrain.
In Mius Front you have lots of PZ IVs versus KVI and T34, which is a bit more fair and you have… trees!
It took me a long time to work out how the heck the campaign mode worked, but when I finally grokked that, cherubim and seraphim appeared next to my computer, singing beautiful harmonies made of squeaking tank tracks, distant rifles and Jericho trumpets.
It’s a really great (set of) game(s), but it is a beautiful madness of Eastern European design decisions and difficulty.
Is there anywhere this can be hosted that doesn’t seem designed to put viruses on a computer?
I’m grateful for the effort, but everything I click on that page to try to download it is some malicious redirect to other webpages, and god knows what.
Well, if it’s not a misprint, then it really calls the author’s judgment into question.
Sorry, I know what you meant. I’ll report back, but it may be a while.
Not sure what that means.
Sorry. Brooski’s post upthread. He ordered a book about Russian’s fighting and got a copy of “It’s hard to hug a porcupine.”
Yet I somehow feel like I came out ahead.
…Wut?
Why the standard version costs more than the “complete”?
Do you already own some of the items in the ‘complete’? It takes that into account when showing a bundle price.
Absolutely not.
I don’t even care about 3D wargames, but for that price I’ll buy it.
What’s that weird backwards “E” next to the number? Is that a spider?
So his thesis boils down to “the Germans actually were very effective soldiers”? Seems to be pushing on an open door there.
He seems to have an axe to grind against modern historians emphasizing the Russian’s performance.
When talking about a book by Glantz he says (in an essay linked in the webpage);
The essay is full of assumptions, while critizising other (very recognized) historians for their assumptions. Since I’m unable to judge the correctness of these, I´m looking forward to Bruce’s insights on the books themselves. They might be more we’ll balanced than this essay in particular.
WWII historiography, particularly that of the Russo-German part of the conflict, has always been bedeviled by strong ideological pressures. Some of it stemmed from the historical loathing many western observers had for the USSR in general, even before the war. Some of it arose from the peculiar circumstances of the Cold War, which exacerbated feelings on all sides. And of course there was the pressure from the Stalinist state to make sure the record only reflected glory on Mother Russia. But there was also, then and now, a strong strain of “Wehraboo,” that emerged immediately after the war and, while it ebbed and flowed over the years, still remains strong.
Hell, I remember playing wargames in gaming clubs in the seventies and eighties with people who would refuse to play the Russians in any WWII game, who always had to play the Germans, and who would simply not stop talking with great enthusiasm and the zeal of the convert about how the Nazis were misunderstood or how they were infinitely better than the vile Russians, etc.
I have no idea about this particular work or author, but it would not surprise me to find out that this is yet another in a long string of efforts to recast the Second World War to the benefit of the Reich.